No wonder.
People writing 30 years after the fact aren't likely to give you the fact. For example:
1.
Thirty years after the fact, who remembers exactly what was said?
(Frank McCourt answers testily: Of course I remember exactly. If a conversation weren’t that important, I wouldn’t include it at all!)
2.
How can you be sure you are telling what really happened, and not your own interpretation clouded by sentimentality, face-saving, sibling rivalry, general cussedness, lousy coffee or the need to make sense of things from a 30-years-later perspective?
(Norman Mailer’s answer: *&!?^!
Oh wait. That’s Norman Mailer’s answer to everything. [Imagine him in his bathrobe and slippers, rat’s nest hair, bleary eyes—hung over if your imagination serves him up young, hacking his lungs out if you get the current picture. The maid comes in as she does every morning: “What do you want for breakfast?” Mailer replies: *&!?^! The maid brings him bacon and toast and coffee, as she does every day. Mailer falls upon it with gusto. “You’re welcome,” she drawls on her way back to the kitchen, where fresh fruit and croissants await her. “*&!?^!” Mailer barks. Bacon bits tumble into the scrubby brush he calls whiskers.]
That’s the short answer. Mailer gave his long answer in Armies of the Night.)
What if there was another way to write memoir?
What if you could write your memoir with the immediacy of a war correspondent?
What if you eliminated the possibility of retrospection and the imperative to make sense of things, to impose an order on experience so that the whole long arc of your life's story makes sense?
What if instead of starting inside your head (with the story you have told yourself about your experience for the past 30 years), you started outside your head (with your experience as it happens), and worked your way in?
What if you approached the writing in such a way that authenticity displaced literary construct?
What would all of that do to fact, memory, subjectivity? Would the memoir remain literature or become merely a diary?
This blog is my literary experiment: Memoir in the moment.
Life is a school of dolphins. If you want to write memoir, you have to be able to see the school for the fish.
All those arcs, rising and falling ...
… on one shared trajectory.
(Not to mention the tuna, which apparently lacks the cuddliness of dolphins. Save the dolphins! Can the tuna!
[Shane, is that you? Get out of my blog!])
Many story arcs, each independent, rising and falling not in concert, on a shared trajectory, with the occasional tuna. That’s life.
Memoir is not about life. It’s about trajectory.
How can you plot the trajectory while you are in it?
Here’s a proverb:
God helps those who help themselves.
This means:
Never trust life. Trust your ability to follow its lead.
The same goes for writing.
(And your tango partner.)
Tom Stermitz says tango is a Rorschach blot: everyone reads into it what they will.
From the second Shane asked me to join tango, I knew what my blot would be. Blots change their shape but never their nature.
Once you know your blot, you can pretty much see your dolphins. All those arcs. That trajectory. The nets.
Here’s what I’ve learned about writing memoir in the moment:
No matter how good your memory or ubiquitous your notes, you’re going to have to fill in some gaps.
Memoir is sleight of hand. I am a magician of literary technique, a master of strategic omission.
It's impossible to avoid the temptation to infuse experience with meaning. Or to mess with readers' heads.
A researcher should never become involved in her subject.
A writer can devise more distractions and avoidance mechanisms than you can imagine. News items. Photos. Poems. Riffs on Normal Mailer.
Eventually you empty your bag of tricks.
I am becoming visible. So are you. This is a slippery slope.
No wonder people don’t write memoir as it happens.
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